http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054867.html
Let me make this clear. This will not pass in the Supreme Court, and Arab parties will not be banned from running in the upcoming election in the Knesset. The same thing proposition was passed in the Central Elections Committee in 2003, and it was of course overturned by the Supreme Court. The leaders of the two parties that have proposed the law this year, Avigdor Lieberman and Zevulun Orlev, are fucking crackpots. Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu (literally "Israel Our Home") has two main platforms: the improvement of social and economic conditions for immigrants, and the forced relocation of Arabs to his vision of Palestine, which I assume is not a very pleasant one. Not even the far right likes Lieberman, because he supports ceding Arab Israeli towns bordering the West Bank to the PA just to get them the fuck out of Israel.
So what do I make of this? Well, I hope to hell that I'm justified in saying not much. The CEC has never had a hell of a lot of real power in Israeli government. The only party they have actually succesfully barred from running in an election was the ultra-right wing Zionist Kach party, the political arm of "Rabbi" Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, the organization to which Baruch Goldstein has belonged before murdering 29 Muslims in a Mosque in Hebron. It was determined to be a fundamentally racist, while the ultra-left Progressive List for Peace was allowed to run (the PLP was nominated for barring because it supported a one-state solution which can be interpreted as "denying that Israel is the Jewish homeland," which the CEC was originally formed to ban as the political platform of any party running in Israel.)
This is not something the Knesset has voted on, and it will never be that. This is something that the members of the CEC have voted on. Regardless, it's of course despicable, and the final quote of that article is perfectly justified. But this isn't going to have any real ramifications for the future.
I hope.
Edit: if you have any inclination to read an Israeli newspaper right now, Haaretz is the major left-wing paper and the only one you should ever look at. Also, their columnists are way hotter than Joe the Plumber.
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Preface: I have no idea how the Israeli government works.
ReplyDeleteBut how did the CEC as a body get so politically out of whack with mainstream Israeli opinion? Or the mainstream opinion of the given ruling party in the governing coalition?
In any event, it just goes to show you: never trust a Lieberman. You should probably also steer clear of anyone who goes by Zezulun just to be safe.
As far as I can tell, the Committee is made up of delegates from each party represented in the Knesset - and there are tons of parties represented in the Knesset. Israeli government is characterized by special interest groups holding a disproportionate amount of power because of both the small number of seats available (120) and the direct-proportion voting system. In the current Knesset, the three major parties control only 60 seats between them (Kadima - 29, Labour - 19, Likud - 12) with the remaining 60 seats split between nine special interest parties. These include Gil (the "Pensioner Party"), the two parties mentioned above, the other religious parties, extreme left parties, and yes, the Arab parties.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens is one party will get a minority and then be forced to form a coalition, but if they want to get anything done they can't form one with another major party. As a result, they take on special interest parties into their coalition, and are forced to give concessions to those parties. So, if Kadima even wants to get something passed, they need to attach a rider to appease the other parties in their coalition or they won't vote for the measure. Since the two (Shas and the National-Religious Party) religious parties tend to vote together and are a combined 15 seats, they're usually an attractive group to pander to, and naturally neither like the Muslims all that much.
It looks like the way the CEC gets formed is that the rider parties exercise their power and get their own members named to the committee, so it's another bottleneck which gets them even more disproportionate representation there than in the Knesset. Of course I don't know if this is true, and it is still chaired by a member of the Supreme Court.
And the supreme court came down on this bs last time? What's the political tendency of the supreme court?
ReplyDeleteYes, the only decision by the CEC that has actually been upheld in the Supreme Court was to outlaw the Kahanites (i.e. Jewish fascists, and classified as terrorists by most intelligence organizations including Israel) from running in 2003. The Supreme Court has a lot more power in Israel than it does in the States or Canada because they don't have a Parliament/House and Senate, they only have the Knesset. Luckily, the special interest groups have little power over the appointments to the Supreme Court because that committee is largely appointed by the President, so it by and large can take care of these insanities without too much fuss. Also, since it's a Jewish state, the Justices are appointed partially by the Israeli Bar Association which means they're all well-versed in modern liberalism and don't let shit like this fly.
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